Cold-Blooded

Why a New In Cold Blood TV Show Misses the Point of the True-Crime Craze

With true-crime phenomenons like the Serial podcast or HBO’s The Jinx all the rage, it should come as no surprise at all to see similar properties in the pipeline. But a just-announced In Cold Blood TV show from the Weinstein Company, while intriguing for a number of reasons, completely misses the point of the true-crime craze.

Truman Capote’s non-fiction book In Cold Blood is inarguably one of the famous American true-crime stories. (The slender “True Crime” sections of bookstores are often comprised of Capote’s book, Helter Skelter, and a handful of volumes on the Black Dahlia case.) Both Capote and his book were so captivating, in fact, that the story has already been explored in three movies (In Cold Blood (1967), Capote (2005), and Infamous (2006)) and in a 1996 TV movie starring Anthony Edwards, Eric Roberts, and Sam Neill.

There is obviously a macabre appeal to the story of the murder of the Clutter family, the incarcerated killers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, the celebrity reporters Capote and Harper Lee, and the murky relationship between fact and fiction in the finished product. And there’s no doubt that In Cold Blood would fit in perfectly with fellow morally turbulent prestige shows like True Detective and Fargo. When announcing the project, Harvey Weinstein said, “Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood has been riveting audiences since it first hit the literary scene almost 50 years ago, and it continues to have that same thrilling, timeless appeal today.” And while all that is certainly true, I’m not sure In Cold Blood will be able to tap into the same insatiable appetite for mystery that fueled Serial and The Jinx junkies.

Because while they may fall under the same “true crime” genre, those recent pop-culture addictions and In Cold Blood don’t really have that much in common. Serial and The Jinx promised to uncover new information about gruesome crimes, unfolding the story over several (but limited) episodes, and inviting listeners and viewers to play along as amateur detectives. Whether or not they delivered on that promise may be up for debate, but what’s not in question is that an overly invested and curious audience is what made Serial and The Jinx (and even fictional shows like True Detective) such can’t-miss properties. If you skipped an episode of either, how could you possibly obsess over Best Buy pay-phone locations or occult blinking patterns with your co-workers at lunch? How could you possibly solve the mystery before the show did?

And that’s exactly what In Cold Blood isn’t, a mystery to solve. Even if you’ve never read the book, seen any of the four (four!) filmed quasi-adaptations, or skimmed the Wikipedia entry, In Cold Blood was never a whodunnit. We know who did it. There is still obviously plenty of fertile and vivid material here for the Weinstein Company to explore. A new In Cold Blood adaptation might even capitalize on the projected popularity of Harper Lee’s upcoming To Kill a Mockingbird sequel and, as I mentioned above, Capote’s blur between fact and fiction is particularly fascinating and has already been folded into the larger conversation about current true-crime phenomenons like Serial and The Jinx. But, at the end of the day, the new In Cold Blood project has more in common with ongoing remake/reboot fever than it does the more recent true-crime wave.